Bitcoin Forum

I started with linuxcoin and my headless mining scripts, and I've added p2pool and some new tricks.  I'm calling it p2pcoin for lack of a better name.

* Network provisioning - checks DNS for a URL to fetch the config file - many config options can be specified in the file or fetched from URLs
* BFGminer pool list is localhost, then up to 10 PEER[0-9]= lines, then BACKUP_POOL=, then TEMP_POOL=
* uses "-S all" in bfgminer to find PGA/ASIC devices and "-S opencl:auto" to find Radeons
* full bitcoind node
* full namecoind node
* full p2pool node
* can use rsync to fetch both block chains
* can use persistence, but works much better using RAM drives (needs ~24 GB of RAM or flash or both if you want to run bitcoind/p2pool)
* works great from PXE
* works as a dumb miner if it can't run bitcoind

It still has a bunch of ugly hacks and quirks, but works quite well.  It attempts to handle local errors the best it can, and has a heartbeat function to report stats every minute.  I use the heartbeat stats to monitor each box and trigger a network power strip to reboot boxes that are seriously stuck.

Note:  The high share speed of p2pool might wear out your flash drive.  If this bothers you, don't use persistence, or just boot from CD or PXE.

Usage example (my mining farm):
I have one box with 32 GB RAM, and several boxes with much less.  All use PXE to boot, none have persistent storage.  All boxes fire up bfgminer as soon as they are booted.  The big box uses rsync to fetch a copy of the block chain from a server on my network, then reindexes it and eventually p2pool starts.  The smaller boxes detect that they are unable to run bitcoind, and just run as dumb miners.  While the p2pool box is starting up, all bfgminer instances (including on the p2pool box) fail down their list to an external pool.  Once p2pool is ready, they all switch back to the local pool.

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Current - Version 0.7.0: p2pcoin-0.7.0.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.7.0.iso.torrent) - 2013-12-18 - Updated bitcoind to 0.8.6, updated bfgminer to 3.8.1, updated p2pool to 13.4. 

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Version 0.0: p2pcoin-0.0.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin-0.0.iso.torrent) - 2012-02-26 - initial early testing release
Version 0.1: p2pcoin-0.1.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.1.iso.torrent) - 2012-02-28 - p2pool updated to 0.9.1 - still early testing
Version 0.2: p2pcoin-0.2.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.2.iso.torrent) - 2012-03-09 - p2pool updated to 0.9.2, bitcoind updated to 0.6.0rc2 - fixed logrotate problem
Version 0.3: p2pcoin-0.3.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.3.iso.torrent) - 2012-03-30 - p2pool updated to 0.10.3, bitcoind updated to 0.6.0final
Version 0.3.1: p2pcoin-0.3.1.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.3.1.iso.torrent) - 2012-04-23 - fixed CD boot problem
Version 0.4: p2pcoin-0.4.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.4.iso.torrent) - 2012-05-03 - updated p2pool to 0.11.1
Version 0.4.1: p2pcoin-0.4.1.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.4.1.iso.torrent) - 2012-05-23 - changed RAMdisk settings, upgraded to p2pool 0.11.2
Version 0.6: p2pcoin-0.6.0.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.6.0.iso.torrent) - 2013-01-26 - Tons of changes.  Now using BFGminer
Current - Version 0.6.4: p2pcoin-0.6.4.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.6.4.iso.torrent) - 2013-07-07 - Updated bitcoind to 0.8.3, updated bfgminer to 3.1.1, updated p2pool to 13.0. 

Id be interested in testing it out, but Ive always used cgminer. I can try it out on my hardware for a bit while Im at home. Let me know how to set this up.

Also I would suggest renaming this thread to : p2pool on USB fully installed ready to go
or something along those lines, as Im sure people are interested in running p2pool from a usb and not have to worry about installing anything, they just missed this thread.

p2pcoin-0.0.iso.torrent (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin-0.0.iso.torrent)

I'm setting up the seeds for the torrent now.

This ISO works as a bootable CD, or you can use unetbootin to write it to a USB stick, or you can extract the files and set it up for PXE booting on your network.

The easiest way to use it is with network configuration.  To do that, you need to add a TXT record to your DNS.  This needs to coordinate with your DHCP server.  If your DHCP servers provide "example.com" as your default search domain, the record needs to be "p2pcoin.example.com", etc.  The answer returned needs to be a URL where the box can download the configuration file.  In bind 9, it would look like this:


When it boots, it will append "?id=" and the MAC address of eth0 to the URL and then download it.  This way, you can specify different options for different boxes, if you need to.

The configuration file takes a bunch of options.  The parser is really dumb, so you need to get the format right.  Every option needs to be the exact key in all caps, an equal sign, and the value.  No spaces, no tabs.

Look in /etc/p2pcoin.defaults for examples of what this file should look like.

BITCOIN_CHAIN_SOURCE=a URL that rsync can use to download blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat (and eventually blk0002.dat, etc)
NAMECOIN_CHAIN_SOURCE=a URL that rsync can use to download the chain files for namecoin (blk*.dat and nameindex.dat)
TEMP_POOL=the full URL for the regular mining pool that you want to use during bootup, before p2pool starts
BACKUP_POOL=the full URL for the backup mining pool that you want to use if there is a problem after p2pool starts, or if the TEMP_POOL has a problem during bootup
BTC_ADDRESS=a bitcoin address where you want your earnings to go
NMC_ADDRESS=a namecoin address where you want your earnings swept to
BTC_ADDR_SOURCE=a URL that returns a bitcoin address
NMC_ADDR_SOURCE=a URL that returns a namecoin address
DONATE=1  (the percentage that you want to donate to the author of p2pool (not to me))
PHOENIX_DEFAULTS_SOURCE=a URL that returns a file with phoenix configuration lines for your cards

You don't need both BTC_ADDRESS and BTC_ADDR_SOURCE, one or the other is fine.  Same goes for the NMC versions.  It adds ?id=MAC to those web requests if you include them.

If you include a PHOENIX_DEFAULTS_SOURCE, that format is tricky too.  It needs to be the exact output of aticonfig --list-adapters, then a tab, and the options to be passed to phoenix when mining on p2pool, then another tab, and the exact options to be passed to phoenix when mining on the startup pool.  Look at /etc/phoenix.defaults for examples of this file.

Side note, please send any good configs to me so that I can include them in future releases.

If you are not using network configuration, you should edit /etc/p2pcoin.defaults and /etc/phoenix.defaults directly, which means that you need to set up persistent storage.  To do that, you need to have a ext2/3/4 filesystem available on the machine labelled "live-rw".  If you are using a USB stick, you can just partition it with a 1 GB FAT partition bootable, and use the rest for persistence.  If you are booting from a CD, you can use a USB stick or a hard drive for storage.

If you have enough RAM, which is about 4 GB, it tries to run bitcoind and namecoind completely out of RAM disk, which is very fast.  If you don't have enough RAM for that, you will need about 4 GB of persistent storage available.

I've probably forgotten a bunch of stuff.  Let me know if anyone has any questions.

p2pool and bitcoind generate a lot of small writes.  Nobody is worried about this killing usb drives?

I use usb linux on each of my rigs (6) and then point them all to a non-mining machine running bitcoind & p2pool on a HDD.

Oh, one other thing.  Bitcoin earnings are generated directly to the address provided, so it is no big deal if the wallet created by bitcoind is lost every time you reboot when using the RAM drive.

The same is not true of namecoin.  There is a script that runs from cron and checks the wallet balance every hour.  If it finds anything, it attempts to send it to the address provided.  This script is not well tested, and even if it were, you'd still have a huge window where a reboot could eat your wallet, and thus coins.  Please keep that in mind.

If you have 4 GB of RAM, it uses ram disk.  Also, no, I'm not worried about killing the USB drive even a little bit.  It would take months or years, and you can get 16 GB sticks for under $20 now.

I don't know how BAMT deals with persistency, but couldn't you do something similar to prevent issues like this? Obviously this would need a USB stick and not a CD boot.

Hmm. Interesting.  So it doesn't keep p2pool & blockchain persistent (written to usb drive).  What happens on reboots?

What I'm thinking of doing in a future release will be to give the option to download the wallet.dat for namecoin from an external source.  There are some security implications of that, of course, but since p2pcoin nodes should be running behind firewalls, it may be a good choice for people that care about the chance of losing their namecoin earnings.

Im not enought experienced to use this but i love to help new projects, so i dl this and keep it on my torrent client for future downloaders.

During a clean reboot, it tries to synchronize the bitcoin and namecoin chains to persistent storage, if you have it.  And then when it boots, if it sees a local copy, and if that local copy isn't more than 2 weeks old, it will try to use it, rather than fetching it from the network again.

No attempt is made to save the p2pool database.  Your shares are already in the cloud, so there isn't any point.

Cool, thanks for seeding.

And if you'd like to try it, I'd be happy to try to walk you through setting it up.

No problem mate im happy to help to share. But for thing itself i do not have atm time to try. Maybe next weekend. But anyway you should edit torrent file in your first post and start keeping revision list also. That way its more easier to download always latest.

So, I think that about a half dozen people have downloaded this so far.  Did anyone get it working?  Does anyone have questions or comments?

I would be more worried about this killing Hard Disk Drives... Yes, the bitcoin blockchain already killed one of my 500GB drives. That's what I got for running it for months non-stop in a windows environment.

Simple explanation: Blockchain fragmentation killed the disk. <-- How do I know? Because I had to recover the blockchain from the disk and as soon as it hit the fragmented part it was sloooooooooow as hell!

Added another line to keep up share. Now im sharing it via 1mb upload and 10mb upload. It should give good speed atleast european downloaders.

I would be careful here.  After months of field testing with BAMT (a usb based linux that makes every attempt not to write to the USB more than required) we see that some USB keys will die after a surprisingly short time (sometimes only a few weeks, with considerably less writes than running p2pool would generate).  It varies greatly from one model of key to another, but I would expect crappy keys to die in a matter of days running p2pool.  Maybe you don't care, but it would be best to warn users of this potential clearly.

If you are doing everything you can to avoid writes, and you are still killing drives, the problem is the drives.  I'll put a note at the top, but the answer in p2pcoin is to boot from CD or PXE if anyone is concerned about their flash drive.  Or even just not bother taking the extra time to add persistent storage.

The name is confusing.  Makes me think it's another altcoin.

I took linuxcoin and added p2pool.  The first name that popped into my head was p2pcoin, and as far as I can tell, nothing else is using that name.

I'm open to suggestions, but I don't really think it is confusing.

Everything including forum usernames has a combination of the words "bit", "coin", "pool", "BTC" etc in them.  What's to be confused about? :D

So when you reboot you have to download the block chain again? That sounds like it could add a lot of downtime.

EDIT: Oh. you mention rsync. I missed that.  This sounds nice for someone with only one miner.

It is even nicer for someone with a fleet of miners that wants to configure once and walk away.

I have 4 rigs, each with 1 to 3 cards.  After I made the 0.1 release this morning, I copied it up to my PXE server and rebooted all of the boxes.  Bam, I'm done.  If I didn't have PXE, I could just burn 4 CDs or write 4 new flash drives and swap them.  Since all of the details are stored on the network, I don't have to customize the CD or USB stick for each rig.

Also, if you have enough RAM to use the RAM disk for bitcoin, but you also have persistent storage, stopping the bitcoin service cleanly (which happens during a normal reboot) will update the stored copy.  When it comes back up, it will only have to catch up to what happened when it was down.

With a fleet of rigs, I feel like BAMT is a better choice.  Running a p2pool node on every one of your miners is unnecessary.

Yeah, probably unnecessary.  But it takes no more effort to do.

0.2 torrent file is missing, fix link please so i can add it to my share machine :D

Until updates come around.

This is a fantastic idea! Well done sir! I think i'll start using it soon myself :) Probably on a HDD rather than a USB stick though..

One thing I would say is please change the name! When I clicked on this I was expecting to see another crazy alt-coin!

Fixed.  Not sure how my script missed that.  Thanks for pointing it out.

Because of the network provisioning, I get the best results with PXE booting and RAM drive.  No storage in my nodes at all.

Any suggestions for a new name?  I wanted to keep it similar to linuxcoin out of respect for Drgr33n's base that I built on, but clearly indicate that it uses p2pool.


Updates are super easy.  Just burn a new CD, write a new flash drive, or replace your PXE image, then reboot fully.

How about BitKnot that is short and easy to remember..

https://i.imgur.com/WmDWW.png

https://i.imgur.com/1Fpl3.png

p2pcoin users need to update to version 0.3 (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.3.iso.torrent) ASAP.  This is due to a change in p2pool (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg813556#msg813556).  Sorry for the short notice.  I was out of town last week and somehow missed forrestv's post when I was catching up.

That makes no sense bro, and it has the word 'bit' in it.

This is less confusing, and doesn't have bit, coin, miner, or anything in the name

https://i.imgur.com/PEUU6.png

Ha!

I tried version .3 from a DVD and USB. When booting from the DVD I got the p2pcoin screen and it just counts down from 10 and keep restarting back to 10. When I tried from USB using UNETBOOTIN it just brought up a blank terminal window with "BOOT:". I will keep watching this and test when the next version comes out.

That's odd.  I've never seen that before.  I'll check it out tomorrow morning.

may i suggest...


https://i.imgur.com/Z2mKi.png

Hahahahaha, awesome.

Ok, the 0.3 ISO posted does fail to boot when burned to a CD.  I'll have 0.3.1 out with a fix soon.

I just tested it by using unetbootin on a Windows box to write it to a formatted USB stick.  For me, the USB boot still works fine.  Is the partition on your USB device marked as bootable?

0.3.1 posted.  CD booting works again, at least for me.  Let me know if anyone else has problems with it.

Hey kjj,

Just put together a small rig (5830 and 5850 currently with 4GB RAM) and thought I'd test this out.  I know very little about linux as I've only used ubuntu and BT before and haven't used them heavily, so if you can help me get this working I'm sure almost anyone else would be able to do it too.

I downloaded the latest 0.3.1 version and used UNetBootin to burn it to a thumbdrive (32GB).

When I boot from the USB stick I see a boot menu a few options:

Default: error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
LinuxCoin (all): error message "cat: can't open '/sys/block/*/removable' : No such file or directory" (repeated many times)
p2pcoin: error message "Invalid or corrupt kernel image"

Any idea what the problem might be?

In the meantime I'll try re-downloading the torrent in case the download got corrupted for some reason.

Thanks!

After you ran unetbootin, did you properly dismount the drive before unplugging it?

Yes I did (both times, as I tried re-downloading formatting stick and re-installing).  Tonight I'll try from scratch using another stick or 2 I have lying around.

I just tested this out.  I didn't have a brand new USB drive, but I have a pile of old ones, so I used DD to zero out a spare 4GB drive.  Then I plugged it into a windows box (XP) and formatted it as FAT32.  Then used unetbootin on Windows to write the 0.3.1 ISO image and used the Windows USB disconnect thing.  Then I switched off one of my rigs, plugged it in, turned it back on.

Booted fine, mining away as I type this.

I googled the messages you are getting, and they weren't very helpful.  Maybe try different RAM?  Seems like a long shot, but someone else reported success that way.

Hmm ok, hopefully will have more luck with another stick tonight then.

As a side note I currently have BAMT mining away (booted up and worked no trouble) on the stick I was originally trying p2pcoin with.

I will still do my best to get p2pcoin up and running rather than just sticking with BAMT though.

0.4 released (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.4.iso.torrent) to upgrade p2pool to 0.11.1.  See forrestv (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg880124#msg880124)'s post.

The network will switch automatically when adoption hits 95%, so there is no hard date.  Better sooner than later, I suppose, but doesn't appear to be super urgent yet.

Ok so with fresh downloaded ISO and a different USB stick it booted up with no trouble, the previous issue must have been something on my end.

Now that its up and running, in the LXTerminal I'm seeing "Waiting for local namecoin node to catch up (986)" over and over again for about 30min now.  I'm assuming this is something I'll just have to wait out?

While this is happening I don't seem to be able to run bitcoin client or the file viewer (when clicked from the menu nothing shows up, no error messages).  Everything else seems to work as it should.

My personal p2pcoin rig farm found a block (http://blockchain.info/tx-index/5026042/ebc8dd4c7e584c8445f13f23bf0162215b7b7c6f04106308f6b22d979f924816).  I haven't been watching every coinbase looking for the [P2COINv0] tag, so this might not have been the very first one found with this setup, but it is the first one that I know of.

Amencon, did your node finish downloading the chains and start up?

Sorry for the long delay.

I've been running into some trouble.

First off all my successful boots into the program are for the "Default" option in the boot selection screen.  I still get "Invalid or corrupt kernel image" for he p2pcoin option.

My first few attempts to let the system catch up to the latest namecoin block resulted in the LXTerminal notifying me that it lost connection to the server.  When restarting the program I have to start the updating process over.

I ended up trying the newest 0.4v on another USB stick and this time caught up to the latest namecoin block then it began updating to the latest bitcoin block and it again ended up losing connection to the server.

I don't believe it is any issue with the network connection since throughout this whole process I can browse the internet just fine with Chromium.

Any ideas what may be going wrong?

Edit:  I've also tested this on a few different machines with different hardware setups, they all end up with the same issue.

0.4.1 is out.  It includes the 0.11.2 p2pool release, as well as some improvements when setting up the RAM disks.

If you have persistent storage, you can run with as little as 2 GB RAM (maybe less, but I don't have anything smaller to test with).  It will still try to use RAM for running bitcoind if you have at least 4 GB, and for namecoind if you have at least 6 GB.

If you have no persistent storage and are running entirely in RAM, you now need a bare minimum of 4 GB.  With less than 4 GB, it will start the temporary miners and just leave them running.  With 4 GB, it will start bitcoind and p2pool in RAM and run them.  With 6 GB or more, it will also start namecoind for merged mining.

The TEMP_POOL and BACKUP_POOL options will now translate __CARD_ID__ into the Radeon ID # for each card when it starts phoenix, so you can configure different workers for each card, if you want to.

My turn to apologize for the delay.  I've been out of town a lot over the last week or so.

When it says it loses connection to the server, can you start a new terminal and see if bitcoind is still running?

Even better, try 0.4.1.  I think you may have been running out of memory.  If that was the problem, 0.4.1 should fix it.

Recently made a move so took awhile to set things back up, sorry about that.

Tried out the new 4.1 version and now it tells me that I need more persistent storage or RAM to run.  The system  I'm testing it on has 4GB of RAM.

I'll try to find some time tomorrow to test on my main system with 16GB of RAM.

Edit:

On my main machine it failed to boot for some reason:

Unable to find a medium containing a live file system

/bin/sh: can't access tty: job control turned off

I suspect this is a separate error not related to problems with p2pcoin software.  I'll do some more testing and report back if I can get it up and running.

Plz update P2pool to fresh version :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.0

There is actually a 0.4.3 version that is on the fixed version of p2pool.

http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/ (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/)

I haven't posted them here because they also have version 0.6.2 of bitcoind, which has problems.  My understanding was that the version of p2pool that was included in 0.4.1 wasn't the version causing problems on the network.  Let me know if I'm wrong about that.  I'll try to spin up a 0.6.99 setup for testing before the weekend too.

P.S.  My 4 nodes of p2pcoin are all running 0.4.3, which has the 3.1 release of p2pool.  I suspect that my nodes represent a decent fraction of all p2pcoin nodes in the world.

Version 0.6 (http://www.jerviss.org/bitcointalk.org/p2pcoin/p2pcoin-0.6.0.iso.torrent) released.

Lots of little changes, and a few big ones.

Biggest one is BFGminer.  The BFG configuration file is built on startup.  This means that it won't stay across reboots if you have persistent storage.  I use PXE in diskless machines, so I didn't notice this one yesterday.  If there are other misc BFG options that anyone wants the ability to adjust, let me know.

The old BACKUP_POOL= and TEMP_POOL= lines from your config are now the last places in the BFG pool list.  First place is localhost, and you can fill in between them with PEER[0-9]= lines.  I run a small cluster of boxes, each with 1-3 cards.  Now they can all fail over to each other, and the backup pool should only get hit if they are all booting at the same time.  It also means that you can use the same image and configuration for a mining-only box if you don't have enough RAM or flash to run a full bitcoind node.

The heartbeat script now pulls hashing rate from the BFG api instead of from p2pool.  The script isn't very clever, and just reports them in the order given by the BFG api.  It'll need some work before it can properly handle mixed-platform mining rigs.

The old restart logic was per-card and has been disabled.  BFG should recover from single card failures.  If you have external monitoring, that can handle whole-box failures.  In the next release, I'll fix the restart script to restart BFG to handle the odd cases where the BFG process has failed without crashing the whole box.

I also added packages for PHP5-cli and TOR.  I don't think that PHP works yet, and I haven't even tried TOR.  These are mostly included so that I can play with them on my own personal boxes.

Can you add AMD Drivers that support 7770 and 7970 devices please?

Would love to hear from you.

Hm. No Reply? :(

Any idea how to update the driver myself in a live linux image?

how do you mine with this? i booted the CD now what?

You have to configure your DNS Server to point to a config.txt file url where your settings are configured.
Read the first two or three posts from kjj in this thread. That makes thinks clear.

Still need help with my HD7770 cards. No ideas?

Sorry for the delay.

You could try grabbing a newer driver (http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/amd64/fglrx-driver/download) and installing it.  If you use persistent storage, it should keep working across reboots.

I'm super busy in real life right now (buying a house and moving), and I actually build this on a slackware box, so I don't have access to any nice tools for package management, so swapping out the driver is a labor intensive process for me.  I've also heard that the newer drivers aren't as good for older cards, so I might end up having to support two versions.

In late May, or maybe even June, I might be able to do this, but probably not much sooner.  Honestly, I was sorta hoping that ASICs would take off before anyone asked for something like this.  :)

0.6.4 has been released.  The initial post has been updated with a link to the torrent, and 2 seeders are already active.

It includes bitcoind 0.8.3 for lower latency, p2pool 13.0 for the new hardfork, and bfgminer 3.1.1 for better PGA/ASIC support.

I've been running mine with ASICMiner USB sticks since Friday, and it works great.

Add magnet link pls?

I use old school command line torrent programs for this stuff.  They don't understand magnets.

But I'm not sure why you'd need a magnet anyway.  Are you having problems downloading the .torrent file?

Magnets not need any .torrent hosting :)
Added few open trackers and there it is:

I'm stuck at 40%. Can someone please seed? I have two VPS's with a ton (≈2 TB each) of bandwidth that can seed for a while once I get it.

I'll be using the magnet link rav3n_pl posted.

Will launch my seed in 2 hrs.

0.7.0 released

bitcoin upgraded to 0.8.6
bfgminer upgraded to 3.8.1
p2pool upgraded to 0.13.4
some little extras

This might be too big for a CD.  Let me know if it is and I'll do another round of housecleaning.

is this project still alive?